I got an email this morning noting that my blog was taking “forever” to load a single post.
A quick check, and I found that it was running 70x overloaded, due to a vast number of spammers trying (and, in every case, failing) to submit wordpress comment-spam.
No spams will get through, because wordpress is set to only allow comments from people who’ve commented before – that’s a chicken-egg scenario that spammers can’t escape. (I wonder. Would the scourge that is “wordpress comment-spam” be reduced easily, instantly if Automattic (the people that make WordPress) had this as the default?).
…but at 2,000+ spammers a day, it was bringing the virtual site down. Server was fine, but I had the site limited precisely so that *it* would die instead of the server, in cases like this.
Now we’re going to try something new, since Automattic’s Akismet is pretty much useless these days. Anti-Spam, let’s see how you do…
4 replies on “Server overloaded by moronic spammers”
Ola! Adam,
Thanks for the above, I have one server witch has over 200 users online, till now no problem but all of this users came from a proxy server (they have the same IP) this is cosing the server to overload! I don’t know if it is a Networking or a Server configuration problem.
If it is so please give me the configuration for Windows with IIS or for Fedora with Apache
All the Best
modsecurity will block a single IP
Adam, how did Anti-Spam work out?
I am converting a site over to WP and feeling worried. I really didn’t like the feel of Akismet, deleted it from the standard auto-set of plugins and then loaded it again the other day…thought better of it and then just deleted it. ha ha. guess I am right about that part. I thought the math equation might be good with AntiSpamBee to block a few countries that hit us hard when I mistakenly had the draft site up for a week. Love to hear what you discovered.
Anti-Spam is working great so far